"Over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increased time to national news and less time to weather and local news. During this period, most of the complaints received from viewers were concerned with our station's coverage of weather and local news. In addition, local businesses that used to advertise during our late-night news program have canceled their advertising contracts with us. Therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand our coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."
This memo addressed from a business manager to his or her staff is concerned with pieces of data about viewership complaints and decline in adverstivers. It was hypothesized in the memo that in order to assuage viewer complaints, and to restore advertising to previous levels, the station must recalibrate it attention toward weather and local news. This argument forgets to investigate other reasons that would explain this recent trend, which could be explained by the quality of the recent coverage of weather and local news rather than the quantity. In addition, advertising is not specifically mentioned to have been cancelled because of the reasons the station manager proposes and could be explained by reasons relating to the quality or sensitive topics addressed in the program. These reasons will be explained in detail.
Firstly, while the station has devoted less attention to local and weather, this need not have been the sole reason for the viewership complaints. It is possible that staffing and budget in their production have rendered this segment of the program to a much less enticing product than could have been the case. With greater attention to detail and production value, weather and local news could receive fair coverage and would be satisfactory to viewers, if given the proper respect. Without a doubt, when the station gets its coverage of local events wrong the average viewer is in a much greater position to understand that the station made a mistake, compared to say, international news.
With regards to the decline in advertising as mentioned by the station manager, it is not specifically stated that cancellations that were acknowledged in the memo are a direct result of the change in the attention given to weather and local news coverage. Businesses could have decided to cancel given recent inappropriate news coverage of the station that could a been deemed offensive in nature or was relating to taboo issues. It is widely known that businesses are quick to pull out these scenarios because it is their interest to reach the widest segment of the population possible. Another reason for businesses to discontinue advertising with the TV station is because they have moved their ad budget online.
To sum up, I believe the TV station manager is in error to come to this swift conclusion, without looking at counter-arguments to their thesis. Before taking further steps that would shape the future direction of the station and its employees, he or she should the issue further. Devoting time to increasing coverage of local and weather, when that would not alleviate profit deficit as a result of advertisers canceling their contracts would be an imprudent sunk cost.
Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 7 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 5 2
No. of Sentences: 16 15
No. of Words: 443 350
No. of Characters: 2235 1500
No. of Different Words: 206 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.588 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.045 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.746 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 172 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 136 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 77 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 54 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.688 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.671 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.312 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.354 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.55 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.114 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
first, firstly, if, look, so, while, in addition, as a result, to sum up
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 23.0 19.6327345309 117% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 15.0 12.9520958084 116% => OK
Conjunction : 17.0 11.1786427146 152% => OK
Relative clauses : 13.0 13.6137724551 95% => OK
Pronoun: 37.0 28.8173652695 128% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 66.0 55.5748502994 119% => OK
Nominalization: 23.0 16.3942115768 140% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2279.0 2260.96107784 101% => OK
No of words: 443.0 441.139720559 100% => OK
Chars per words: 5.14446952596 5.12650576532 100% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.58776254615 4.56307096286 101% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.79950663282 2.78398813304 101% => OK
Unique words: 208.0 204.123752495 102% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.469525959368 0.468620217663 100% => OK
syllable_count: 710.1 705.55239521 101% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.6 1.59920159681 100% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 10.0 4.96107784431 202% => Less pronouns wanted as sentence beginning.
Article: 1.0 8.76447105788 11% => OK
Subordination: 5.0 2.70958083832 185% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.67365269461 60% => OK
Preposition: 7.0 4.22255489022 166% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 16.0 19.7664670659 81% => Need more sentences. Double check the format of sentences, make sure there is a space between two sentences, or have enough periods. And also check the lengths of sentences, maybe they are too long.
Sentence length: 27.0 22.8473053892 118% => OK
Sentence length SD: 47.4102771032 57.8364921388 82% => OK
Chars per sentence: 142.4375 119.503703932 119% => OK
Words per sentence: 27.6875 23.324526521 119% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.5 5.70786347227 79% => OK
Paragraphs: 4.0 5.15768463074 78% => More paragraphs wanted.
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 3.0 8.20758483034 37% => More positive sentences wanted.
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.67664670659 128% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.268063505011 0.218282227539 123% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0900396353721 0.0743258471296 121% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0627301802189 0.0701772020484 89% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.164924952669 0.128457276422 128% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0448048195527 0.0628817314937 71% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.6 14.3799401198 115% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 44.07 48.3550499002 91% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.8 12.197005988 113% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.83 12.5979740519 102% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.75 8.32208582834 105% => OK
difficult_words: 106.0 98.500998004 108% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 14.5 12.3882235529 117% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.8 11.1389221557 115% => OK
text_standard: 13.0 11.9071856287 109% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.